New Report Says Recently Approved Medications May Pose Risk
May 1, 2002
According to a new report published in Wednesday's Journal of the American Medical Association, doctors should prescribe older medications with proven track records instead of recently approved drugs that may be riskier to a patient's health. The study, conducted by researchers with Cambridge Hospital, Harvard Medical School and the consumer watchdog group Public Citizen, reviewed 548 drugs approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) from 1975 through 1999. More than ten percent were either assigned a serious-side-effect warning after their introduction or withdrawn from the market entirely.
But because the FDA approved a majority of these drugs in the last few years, the researchers estimate that an additional ten percent will be assigned "black box warnings" or be banned in the near future. The report referred to the fact that a drug may stay on the market for several years before patients begin to suffer from the medication's previously unknown side effects. Although pressure from pharmaceutical companies and doctors' failure to pay attention to a drug's warning label are often blamed for drug misuse, the researchers say the FDA should institute new procedures and policies to limit the number of approved medications when safe alternatives already exist.
Doctors with the FDA say the introduction of "unsafe drugs" is not as frequent as the report indicates. They insist that patients should not be concerned about using new drugs prescribed by their physicians.
-- Article Courtesy of InjuryBoard.com
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